Historically, corporations have used paper, microfilm and microfiche media for the long term storage of information important to the corporation. Each of these types storage media can take massive amount of physical storage space, and require considerable effort when the retrieval of stored information is necessary. Such media are still widely in use, both for historical and current archiving of information. Electronic storage archives have been developed that enable large electronic repositories that facilitate relatively easy retrieval of electronic files. Typically, these electronic storage archives allow the long term archival of document bitmap images, computer generated reports, office documents (e.g., word processing documents and spreadsheets), audio and video files, etc.
The hardware typically incorporated in an electronic archive is comprised of a general purpose computer and storage devices (such as magnetic disks, optical disks and magnetic tape subsystems). The hardware is typically operated and accessed by software comprising an operating system, database management systems, hierarchical storage management software (HSM) and archive management software. There are at least four significant limitations associated with current long term archival systems. First, larger corporations will invariably require several geographically diverse heterogenous archival systems in order to support the various operations of the corporation throughout the country and the world. For example, The corporation's research and development facility in London England has a separate archival system from the archival system for one of the corporation's manufacturing sites in Dallas Tex. Even if each of the archive facilities has a heterogeneous archival (e.g., a database manager) the hardware and the software comprising the archival at the two sites is invariably provided by two different vendors whose proprietary product are not interoperable (i.e., the software at the London site cannot be used to access the information stored at the Dallas site).
A related second problem is that even if the hardware and the software at the London and Dallas are from the same vendor, the corporation will typically not have any mechanism for managing information accesses at the enterprise level, treating all of the corporation's archives as single resource regardless of the location.
A third significant problem is that an electronic document stored in one format can only be used by the specific retrieval applications that support that document storage format. Frequently, retrieval applications have very different formatting requirements, thus creating further compatibility problems. For example, a check image contained in the archive facility of a bank is typically in TIFF-JPEG or TIFF-G4 format while the image of a bank statement is typically in IBM AFP, Xerox Metacode or Adobe PDF format. The retrieval application (e.g., Netscape or Microsoft browser) or device (Palm PC, smartphone) frequently cannot display images in the format in which the images are stored. Although both electronic files are images, they cannot be retrieved by the same retrieval application. This compatibility problem severely limits the range of retrieval solutions and frequently increases the cost and time in building custom file conversion functions.
Analog archives, in particular microfilm and microfiche media, is fairly well entrenched in some corporations and government agencies. The rate of migration to digital repositories in these organizations has been slower than expected.
One reason for hesitation in abandoning analog archives are technology obsolescence issues dealing with digital storage media and digital file formats over the very long term future. For example, some corporations archived data on eight inch or five and one quarter inch floppy disks. Finding the disk drives to even accept these disks, let alone the operating systems to read them is a daunting task. It has been challenging to prove that digital objects can be preserved and viewable beyond 50 years. Analog media (paper, microfilm, microfiche, and ion beam etching) can last hundreds of years and can be read with ubiquitous optical systems that are easily available or even replicable. Digital media (tapes, diskettes, optical storage (e.g., Compact Disks)) also degrade over time (e.g., 15-25 years) and must be re-recorded to preserve the information encoded thereon.
One further reason that some businesses have been slow to embrace digital archiving is that digitizing analog media can be very expensive. Many customers leave historical analog media ‘as is’ while using digital repositories on ‘day forward’ documents.
A final significant limitation with current archive systems is that these systems impose great challenges in applying enterprise level management and control processes including consolidated usage tracking and billing information; performance measurement and management; uniform access and retrieval application and security and a uniform look and feel for document displays.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to allow users to have a unified information retrieval front-end and user experience across all digital as well as analog information repositories. It is a further object to facilitate a gradual migration path for users from analog to digital repositories.